The Sony HiFD (High capacity Floppy Disk) was a high-capacity

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

system developed by

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

and

Fujifilm , trading as Fujifilm, or simply Fuji, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operating in the realms of photography, optics, office and medical electronics, biotechnology, and chemicals. The offerings from th ...

and introduced in late 1998. Development and sale of the drives was discontinued by early 2001. Announced in October 1997, HiFD disks offered a capacity of 200 MB while maintaining backwards compatibility with standard 720 KB and 1.44 MB diskettes. Sony initially planned to begin shipping the drives in the first half of 1998, however, the introduction was delayed until the end of the year.

TEAC TEAC may refer to: * TEAC Corporation () is a Japanese electronics manufacturer. TEAC was created by the merger of the Tokyo Television Acoustic Company, founded in 1953, and the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company, founded in 1956. Overview ...

and

Alps The Alps () ; german: Alpen ; it, Alpi ; rm, Alps ; sl, Alpe . are the highest and most extensive mountain range system that lies entirely in Europe, stretching approximately across seven Alpine countries (from west to east): France, Sw ...

also planned to introduce HiFD drives. The first drives to reach the public were external

parallel port In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once ( parallel ...

models priced at $199. An internal ATA version was later offered, with a

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

version planned but never launched. IBM offered an internal HiFD drive as an option on some of its workstations in 2000. Its immediate competitors were the popular

Iomega Iomega (later LenovoEMC) produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy d ...

Zip drive The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 ...

, which had a capacity of 100 MB and Imation's Laser-Servo LS-120

SuperDisk The SuperDisk LS-120 is a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 MB floppy disk. The SuperDisk hardware was created by 3M's storage products group Imation in 1997, with manufacturing chiefly by ...

, which had a capacity of 120 MB and like HiFD was also compatible with existing floppy disk formats. In spite of Iomega's healthy market lead, many observers confidently predicted that the HiFD would swiftly take over the market, and ultimately replace the floppy drive. This did not happen, however. A few months after launch it emerged that the HiFD suffered from frequent crashes during read/write operations, and had a tendency of having its read rate drop into the low kilobyte per second range, effectively rendering it unusable. Initially it was thought that a new driver could solve these problems – instead, Sony issued a full recall at the start of the following year. The HiFD was re-released in November 1999, using a

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

connection for the external drive. The whole affair gave the HiFD a reputation for being unreliable, and by this time the Zip drive now sported a 250 MB capacity and

CD-RW CD-RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format introduced in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, require ...

drives were entering the mainstream. These factors doomed the second HiFD to failure. Many people compared the HiFD to Sony's

Betamax Betamax (also known as Beta, as in its logo) is a consumer-level analog recording and cassette format of magnetic tape for video, commonly known as a video cassette recorder. It was developed by Sony and was released in Japan on May 10, 1975, ...

videotape format. However, while the failure of Betamax is often blamed on poor management, it is generally thought that HiFD would ultimately have failed no matter what Sony did – CD-R(W) had a built-in advantage with the large number of CD-ROM (reader) drives in computers (even taking into account the fact that not all CD drives could read CD-Rs and that most, early on, could not read CD-RWs), and its higher capacity. The fact that ultimately SuperDisk (even as LS-240, which could read and write 240 MB and 120 MB media, supported 1.44 MB HD floppies and could format them up to 30 MB) did not survive either is seen as the greatest support for this theory.

References

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The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

, access-date=2018-07-24 , language=en {{Cite web , url=https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/00q4_sony.pdf , publisher=

Sony Corporation , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

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InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (abbreviated IW) is an information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a web-only publication. Its parent company today is International Data Group, and its siste ...

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See also

References